Through
their gentle walk, the nymphs of Act I make us aware that Orpheus
is remembering Eurydice not as a woman, but rather as a classically
stylized embodiment of feminine grace. The psychological trauma that
could cause a fixation upon a classicist vision of women serves as
the focal point of Wilhelm Jensens short story Gradiva,
which
in turn was the focus of Sigmund Freuds first literary analysis
in 1907. Jensen describes a young archeologist named Norbert who is
in love with the classical walk of a young woman he names Gradiva;
this woman he finds depicted on an ancient Roman copy of a Greek relief
associated with Pompei. Jensens Gradiva walks dynamically forward
with the very raised back foot characteristic of Eurydices Apollonian
grace. Norbert becomes aware of his long suppressed desire for a childhood
friend through a series of dreams and through his study of Gradivas
Greek walk. This walk turns out to be his lost friends walk,
transformed into a safe, archeological, classicized, stone formthe
symbol for Freud of Norberts sexual repression. The woman he
once loved recognizes his trauma and follows Norbert to Pompei, transforming
herself into a living Gradiva and walking in front of him in order
to break through his insanity and lead him back to a healthy erotic
life.

Enveloped
in a dreamy blue light,32
overwhelmed by the disembodied sound of choral singing from behind
the curtain, Jaques-Dalcrozes Orpheus seems to be inhabiting
the same dream world as Jensens archaeologist, haunted by a
similar archaeological manifestation of his own sexual repression.
He dreams in Act I of an Apollonian Eurydice, whose beautifully arched
ankle not only symbolizes her classical perfection, but also the impossibility
of that idealshe is in hell after
all because she was bitten by a snake and thus brought to her death.
Like Jensens archeologist, Jaques-Dalcrozes Orpheus will
attempt to face the emotions hiding beneath his nostalgic fixation
on an archaic image. He will experience in Act II a terrifying visual
nightmare, leading him to a direct confrontation with Eurydice herself.

Before
he finds Eurydice, however, he must confront Amora character
that never physically appeared on Appias stage at all. Amors
voice, though, was heard like a promise from behind the
stage as Eurydices tomb opened, revealing a brilliant light
from another world (Ernst Ansermet, qtd. in Appia 122). Inspired by
Rudolf Steiner and Gurdijieff, the lighting technician for the show,
Alexandre Salzmann, imbued Amors light with moral and spiritual
significance. Martin Buber described the space created by this light
as unnamable: It is shaped by a principle whose
name we do not yet know and of which we know only a symbol drawn from
the senses: creative light (Martin Buber 82). From Jaques-Dalcrozes
Amor, Apollo passes on to Orpheus the clarifying light of reason,
which he then takes with him to fight the furies in the underworld.

In
Jaques-Dalrozes production of Orpheuss famous second
act, Emmi Leisner (as Orpheus) enters the dream of Hades by descending
Appias long dramatic flight of stairs. She is accompanied not
by Orpheuss famous lyre, but rather by a powerful light that
increases in brilliance as she moves downwards, symbolizing Orpheuss
role as an enlightened artist and Apollonian hero who brings with
him reason, music, and the word.33This
emblematic light defined Orpheus as the spiritual leader, or elite
of his communityas one of the progressives who marched
alone, lighting the way, and whom Jaques-Dalcroze believed the
masses necessarily had to follow (Le Rythme 13; original).
Emmi Leisner had trained in rhythmic gymnastics for several months
before taking on the part of Orpheus; she used her training particularly
in this scene, allowing Orpheus to invade the physical space of the
furies and shadows in his attempts to tame them. In
this hell, the furies confront Orpheus with the vivid specter of his
own sexuality, singing and dancing a series of violent movements,
choreographed by Jaques-Dalcrozes student, Anne Beck.34Audiences were particularly excited to see this
famous scene staged as they imagined it may have been in the eighteenth
century, before the decline of ballet and dance.35Jaques-Dalcroze also gave the furies more opportunity
in which to move by opening the scene with the Dance of the
Furies, a number Gluck had originally written for the reform
ballet Don Juan (1761), and that he later added to the Parisian
version of Orpheus in 1774.36
Jaques-Dalcroze also repeated the furies more commonly known
dance no. 20 after the chorus no. 23, causing slight dramatic and
harmonic confusion, and demonstrating that he was less interested
in Orpheuss ability to overwhelm the furies with his harmonies
and vocal sound than in their presentation of a Dionysian sexual threat
through plastique animée.

In bringing the furies to life, Jaques-Dalcroze
undoubtedly had before him not only Isadora Duncans recreation
of the Dance of the Furies from
Glucks Orpheus of 1911, but also Wagners more famous
designs for the Bacchanal in Tannhäuser.37
In the period between Wagner and Jaques-Dalcroze, choruses of angry
women (either Bacchanten, Maenades, or Furies), were established as
a dominant trope, providing a Dionysian image of the feminine that
dialectically opposed the Apollonian grace presented in Act I. Jaques-Dalcroze
intensified the threatening allure of these spirits by dividing the
furies up into opposing groups of furies and shadows, each of whom
wore different costumes and acted independently of each other. The
furies sexually provoked not only Orpheus, but also their audiences,
by dressing in shocking new maillots resembling modern gymnastic
suits and seen in Hellerau publicly for the first time.38Many members of the audience found it unsettling
to see the rapid individual motions of their glistening white limbs
and felt overwhelmed by the sea of moving bodies squirming and twisting
before them: it was just a mass of swarming larvae, I dont
know what fantastic image of Gustav Doré or what evocation
of Dante, Ernst Ansermet shuddered (Appia 122; original).Imagine,
George Bernard Shaw told a friend, all the pupils at the school,
heaped on the floor in a dim light and tossing their arms and legs
about looked like heaps of snakes in hell (Bernard Shaw
126).39

The famous dance of the furies from Don Juan
offered Jaques-Dalcroze an entirely different rhythmic framework from
that of the nymphs walking lament of Act I. He cut out the mysterious
trembling in the first ten measures of Glucks score, starting
the dance immediately with the powerfully simple progression that
begins at m. 11 (Müller 91).40Each
chord here receives a four-bar dramatic emphasis and spectacular hammering
out on the accented first beat of each bar, giving Annie Beck occasion
to have the furies and shadows thrust themselves from one sharp, terrifyingly
tense body position into another, designed to match the violence of
the downbeats. Hans Brandenburg remembered that the furies
intentional, accentuated stamping added a coarsening, impertinent
instrument to the music, and that they unfortunately stuck
too much to the bar line, rather than advancing to the grand, freely
controlled line of a rhythmic movement (Brandenburg 82; original).
The tension of the music was so dramatic that even years after Tristan,
Jaques-Dalcrozes audiences practically fell off their seats,
each time the rondo dances motto dissonance recurred (as in
m. 316 where it is a vii/E over a pedal E). (Listen
to Ex. 3; download size 653K)

Unlike
Wilhelm Jensens archaeologist, Orpheus is not awakened by this
musical and visual nightmare to the hidden meanings of his archaic
Eurydician vision. Rather, he remains in a state of troubling psychological
blindness that is significant for Jaques-Dalcrozes interpretation
of the opera. After overcoming the furies through the transcendence
of his pure light and sincere song, Orpheus confronts in Elysium not
the vibrant young woman Freud found behind the classical relief of
Gradiva, but rather Eurydice as a glorious Apollonian presence. Skeptical
about the female bodys base urges, Jaques-Dalcroze presented
the real Eurydice as even more chaste than Orpheuss memory of
her. This classicized, chaste depiction of Eurydice emphasized Jaques-Dalcrozes
belief that in plastique animée women had to transcend
their own corporeality through classicization, relinquish their connection
with their sexuality or instinct, and mold themselves aesthetically
into art.41 Appia and Jaques-Dalcroze
were so convinced of this process that they suggested that their students
dance in the nude, because:

as the idea of sex diminishes in
their artistic fever and thanks to the will they have to consecrate
themselves entirely to beauty and truth of expression, and as
their bodies are penetrated by feeling, so they sense that they
would be committing a sin against the spirit by not respecting
the nudity of the human body. (Appia 14; original)

Eurydice
joins her chorus in expressing a dance of idyllic bliss and sorrow.
Although no photographs survive documenting the blessed spirits
visual appearance and movement style, reviews suggest that this chorus
resembled the nymphs of Act I in their dignified gestures and serene
music.42 They presented
attitudes couchées,43
mirroring the rhythmic vitality of Appias innovative and visionary
stage design by dancing with imperceptible elevations of their
arms, inclined heads, and slow evolutions
(Ansermet, qtd. in Appia 124). Ernest Ansermet marveled at how perfectly
Eurydice realized the music of Glucks famous flute solo in dance
no. 31 (qtd. in Appia 124). In Berliozs opinion, this dance
expressed the sublime lament of a suffering and despairing spirit,
and eternal grief, still imbued with the passions of earthly
life better than any other in the repertoire (228).

As
Orpheus attempts to bring Eurydice to the earths surface in
the most famous and troubling scene in the opera, she expresses for
the first time
the desires that constitute her subjectivity. He marches proudly to
the surface in his music, making no attempt to communicate to her
through dance or gesture, although these expressive means have not
been forbidden by the gods. (Click
here for text)Dalcroze emphasized Orpheuss and Eurydices
failure to develop mutual trust and rise to the surface as a unified
force by adding trumpets, horns, and trombones to the instrumental
interludes. This instrumentation gives Orpheuss march an ominous
tone, suggesting that his strict rhythms do not match Eurydices
lyric dance (Müller 92). Eurydice herself takes on the allure
of the timid young woman depicted on a Greek relief, one that Rainer
Maria Rilkea subsequent visitor to Helleraudescribed in
the poem Orpheus, Eurydice and Hermes (written in 1904).
Rilkes Eurydice does not provoke repressed desire through revealing
sexual allure, but rather teaches Orpheus through her own Apollonian
form about the serene transformation she experienced in the service
of musical ideas and through her own human death. The poem's Eurydice
walks again, but this time:

Confused, gentle, and without impatience.
She was absorbed, like a woman great with hope,
and took no notice of the man who walked ahead
Or of the path that led them up toward life.
She was absorbed. And her death-existence
Filled her like fullness itself.

She was inside a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex was closed
like a young flower in the evening,
and her hands had now grown so unused to marriage
that even the light gods guiding touch,
endlessly gentle, sickened her,
Like too much intimacy.

And when, all at once,
the god stopped her and with pain in his voice
spoke the words: He has turned around,
she understood nothing and said softly: Who?

(Rilke, Selected Poems 545)

Jaques-Dalcroze omits Eurydices very human rage aria about leaving
Elysium, and proceeds immediately to the moment when Orpheus glances
at her. At this point she melts into the curtains as wistfully as
she emerged from them, leading the spectators to believe she had been
a vision all along, or, as Jaques-Dalcroze commented, as if
it had all been a dream (Giertz 164; original).
Eurydices disappearance into the hazy blueness of the plush
curtains communicated in the strongest terms that Jaques-Dalcrozes
method was not concerned with the human body and its sexuality, but
rather with its transcendence. Her body evaporates into thin air,
her energy transformed into the shining glow of the clear bright light
that floods the stage, releasing what Jaques-Dalcroze described as
energy or joy, a new factor of moral progress, a
new stimulant of the human willthe goal of plastique
animée (Le Rythme 59; original).
Several years later, Paul Valéry immortalized this neoclassicist
vision of dance as transformation in his influential essay Lâme
de la danse. In his essay, Socrates, Phaedra, and Éryximaque
engage in a dialogue over the meaning of dance by watching the Greek
dancer, Athikté. This dancer begins by performing Eurydices
classical Greek walk, the ankle tipping the body towards the
point, the other foot passing and receiving this body, transferring
it in advance (Valéry 13; original).
Athikté quickly moves into complex movements, avoiding the
boredom of reality through the ecstatic impulse of her
acting body, which participates with all her being in the pure
and immediate violence of extreme happiness, an instant
of bodily transcendence in which she resembles a flame (Valéry
26; original).
Rainer Maria Rilke expressed a similar vision of the transformative
joy of dance when he returned to the figure of Eurydice in his Sonetten
an Orpheus, in which he immortalized the recently deceased young
dancer Wera Ouckama Knoop:

Choose
to be changed. With the flame, with the flame be enraptured,
where from within you a thing changefully-splendid escapes:
nothing whereby that earth-mastering artist is captured
more than the turning-point touched by his souring shapes.

(Rilke, Sonnets 111)

In many interpretations of Glucks Orpheus, Eurydices
death, however beautiful, is deemed necessary for Orpheuss development
as a poet and artist. She is the muse whose absence enables Orpheus
to create song in his powerfully symbolic air Che faro senza
Eurydice. Jaques-Dalcrozes production contested that familiar
narrative by having Orpheus collapse exhausted at the end of his aria,
leading some of the spectators to conclude that he died without experiencing
any psychological or spiritual awakening. By turning around to glance
at Eurydice, he demonstrated that he could not live without the vision
of her dance, and that he had not learned to be an independent artist,
a requirement of plastique animée. Orpheus had neither
faced his demons nor transcended the realm of his own artistic activity
to become pure light. If that was not enough to
shock his audience, Jaques-Dalcrozes decision to truncate the
opera at this point certainly was. Musically knowledgeable spectators
argued over the aesthetic merits of omitting Glucks disliked
yet familiar happy ending in favor of an abrupt return to the opening
choral number. This return included a dance by the mourning nymphs,
who simply repeated their lament over the loss of Eurydice as they
closed the curtains and the performance ended.44
The omission of the famous ballet sequence from the Parisian version
of the opera proved unequivocally that this production had not been
about dance, but rather about a new art of movement that visualized
musical ideas. The nymphs return also indicated that plastique
animée could only work if Eurydice remained a distant and
unattainable vision or ideathe inspiration for Orpheuss
song and the absence that enabled the choruss dance. The nymphs
reveal that the operas central musical idea was Nietzsches
elegiac pain of eternal loss (208); they allowed Jaques-Dalcroze
to unify his production by expressing, as he said in his own words,
only the tragic core of the Orpheus myth, without its pompous or entertaining
elements (Ansermet, qtd. in Appia 124).

Jaques-Dalcrozes interpretation of Glucks famous opera
as a tragic depiction of Eurydices Apollonian metamorphosis
left less than a unified impression on his audiences. Whereas a few
writers shared Jaques-Dalcrozes and Appias aesthetic tastes,
and reveled in their Orpheuss classical beauty, many
others were wary of the possibility of transcendence or bliss. Gerhart
Hauptmann, for example, felt charmed and shaken by the revelation
that beauty still existed in modern bodies, just a bit covered up
(Reudel 17; original).
And Paul Claudel exclaimed almost ecstatically that, it is the
first time since ancient Greece that we see true beauty on the stage
(476; original).
But many critics felt less emphatic, joked about Jaques-Dalcrozes
project, and wondered about his motives. After all, why were all these
young women so diligently following his orders? For Oskar Bie and
other eminent critics, the source of such energy was not Apollonian,
but rather could only be erotic female energy (36667). As John
Balance explained in the English journal The Mask:

Apollo never asked for a parade of womanly charms in
his service Women dont follow after Gods that offer
bitterness No, Venus, or some more pleasant Deity is
their favorite. And as Dalcroze fills his school with girls
he empties it of Apollonian possibilities and lets the Cyprian
slop into the Fold. (334)

In
a culture immersed in Nietzsches Die Geburt der Tragödie,
Jaques-Dalcrozes classicizing attempt at Greek orchestique
appeared as a concession to Apolloa misdirected emphasis on
plasticity, clarity, harmony, light, rational coherence, and a miscomprehension
of musics mythical mystery and Dionysian depths. Some critics
even understood Jaques-Dalcrozes Orpheus nationalistically
as an expression of French civilization that had nothing to do with
the Dionysian rhythm in the soul of the German people (Marsop 36869).
But perhaps nobody was more suspicious of Jaques-Dalcrozes project
than the Hellerauer workers themselves. The Czech worker Wenzel Holek
commented, for example:

One had indeed proclaimed to the whole
world that rhythmic gymnastics was an all-purpose medicine that
would solve all our social problems. But that still didnt
enable me to suppress my conviction that it may all be nice
physical exercise, but nothing more.

The blacksmith was supposed to hammer rhythmically, the locksmith
polishes, and the carpenter planes. And peoples will was
supposed be raised within them. What were people promising themselves
from all this, and what was our real work worth in comparison?
It was idealistic, unpractical gushing enthusiasm. (128; original)

Holeks
remarks, and the reactions of the community in which he lived, demonstrated
how impossible it had become by 1912 to unify German society under
the banner of Classicist, humanist principles. Orpheus did not unify,
but rather caused dissention and contradiction. Very shortly after
the performance of Orpheus in Hellerau, Jaques-Dalcroze had
to leave Germany and abandon his school with the outbreak of World
War One. Ironically, the spectacular Festspielhaus in Hellerau
became not a site of cultural pilgrimage, but rather a field hospital
for soldiers, and later, during National Socialism, barracks for the
Reichspolizei, SA and SS. After 1945 the Red Army moved in,
remaining until the Berlin wall fell in 1989. For almost a century
then, daunting violence and the rhythm of guns and marches disrupted
Jaques-Dalcrozes far too innocent aesthetic dream of a beautiful
classic walk.

The contradictions of Hellerau were nowhere more evident than in the
careers of its dancers. Whereas many of the young gymnasts who danced
as furies went on to establish major careers in modern dance (including
Mary Wigman, Rosalia Chladek, Bertha von Zoete, Grete Wiesenthaler,
and Micho Ito), nothing was later heard of the gymnast who danced
Eurydice, and of the nymphs who followed in her footsteps. The violence
of the furies, instead of the classicist Eurydice, seemed to resonate
in the minds of the young women dancing and of the audience members
with feelings they considered central to their own lives and time.
Jaques-Dalcrozes fiercely independent furies left him because
they no longer wanted to submit to the rhythms of his chosen music
(Suzanne Perrottet 9293). The fury became so much part
of the modern dancers image, that some observers stereotypically
identified the independence they required for their careers with qualities
of anger or madness. When Rudolf von Delius first met Mary Wigman
in 1914, he wrote that she was wild, tall, electric. Almost
like a fury (Odom 51). The desires of these furies, and of the
audience members who followed them, could not be met by following
in the blissful steps of Eurydice. Such unsettled spectators felt
a need for a Freudian exploration of the unconscious, and for a Dionysian
conflict that was left unresolved in Jaques-Dalcrozes Apollonian
productiona production that would thus continue to torment and
disrupt the entire twentiethcentury tradition of neoclassical
music visualization.